Intel Moves to Play Bigger Role in Server Design

Intel 's market share in chips for servers is even stronger than in personal computers. But there’s plenty of threats out there, so the Silicon Valley giant is angling for greater influence in the way such machines are designed.

The evidence will be apparent at a company forum for developers in Beijing this week. Intel is planning not only to introduce faster microprocessors but provide new details of what it calls a “rack-scale architecture,” a roadmap of sorts for designing and plugging together servers to manage current Internet-style workloads.

There’s plenty of activity in the area. Most computers for big business tasks once were refrigerator-sized machines that had been designed specifically for heavy-duty jobs. In the 1990s, however, companies started trying to save money by stacking boxes that were very similar to complete personal computers, with separate power supplies, disk drives and clusters of cables to connect them together.

That worked for years. But the sheer volume of Web-based computing jobs, and the data they generate, is leading companies to rethink server designs to reduce unnecessary components and save money–and, especially, reduce power consumption.

Web companies like Google took a lead in the field Facebook has also been aggressive lately, pushing an initiative called Open Compute that aims to spur the creation of low-cost modular servers to reduce server cost and complexity.

Intel has supported that effort, appearing along with other companies at an Open Compute event in January. But it has also been doing separate development work on server design.

The chip maker says its work in the area has been influenced by collaboration with some big Web and telecom companies in China–Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent and China Telecom–on what they are calling Project Scorpio. They aim to deliver the design for a rack that lets servers share power supplies, fans and network components.

At the same time, Intel is also making what it calls a “reference design”–a blueprint of sorts–to encourage computer makers to create more efficient systems using an array of Intel technology. Besides its standard Xeon chips–and new low-end Atom chips for applications where simple, power-sipping processors are well-suited–Intel plans to supply communications components that include its silicon-based optical networking technologies.

Doesn’t a lot of this duplicate Facebook’s Open Compute initiative? That question was put to Lisa Graff, Intel’s vice president and general manager of its data center marketing group, during a briefing with reporters last week.

“Facebook is doing what is best for them,” Graff said. “It works great for us and for some other companies, but not for everyone.”

One difference with the Facebook approach, of course, is that it envisions the use not only of x86-style chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices but also chips based on ARM Holdings designs that have become dominant in smartphones and tablets.

“Anything that allows ARM a toehold in Intel’s core market is a bad thing,” observes Roger Kay, an analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates.

Hewlett-Packard on Monday also talked up another potential toehold for ARM with low-power servers as part of an effort called Project Moonshot, though systems with Intel Atom chips are slated to be early out of the gate.

Intel, in any case, is planning to offer an ever-widening variety of chip choices for server makers. Other disclosures at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing include a new Atom model for servers, code-named Avoton, which is expected to arrive in the second half of the year and be the first to use Intel’s most advanced production technology.

The company is also discussing plans to introduce a new model of its Xeon E3 family–based on a design called Haswell, that draws just 13 watts of power–a 25% improvement. Intel says new versions of its higher-end Xeon E5 and Xeon E7 will be available in the third and fourth quarter, respectively.